Edna Longley's latest collection of critical essays marks a move back
from Irish culture and politics to poetry itself as the critic's central
concern. She considers how poets are read and received at different
times and in different contexts, by academics as well as by a wider
readership, and from Irish, English and American viewpoints. But her
interest in the reception of poetry is still very much influenced by
debates about literature and politics in a Northern Ireland context, and
in the book's final essay she relates poetry to the "peace process". In
two of these essays, The Poetics of Celt and Saxon and Pastoral
Theologies, she has some fun with mutual stereotypes (the Hughes or
Heaney figure), and with English misreadings of Irish poetry and its
cultural and intellectual environment, and Irish poets' frequent
complicity in this situation. In other essays she discusses Edward
Thomas and eco-centrism, the criticism of Louis MacNeice and Tom Paulin,
and the poetry of Larkin and Auden. Poetry and Posterity follows Edna
Longley's recently reissued Poetry in the Wars, her classic work on
Ireland, poetry and war, and her much celebrated book, The Living
Stream: Literature & Revisionism in Ireland.
